Is The World Really Only 6,000 Years Old?

Question

Creationists believe that the world is only 6,000 years old and was created by god as described in the book of genesis.

The date of creation was worked out by the scholar James Ussher back in the 17th century as being 4004 BC and this date was accepted by the Roman Catholic Church as being accurate up until the mid 19th century when Darwin blew this religious nonsense away.

http://www.angelfire.com/mi/dinosaurs/earthage.html

However, creationists still hold on to this theory and this week they have opened a hi-tech museum in mid-America which they hope will convince others of their belief.

Do any of you still believe in this 'young age of the earth' theory and if so how can you justify it?

Answer 1

Noooooooooooooooooooooo!

Answer 2

I do! I'm no scientist, but I decided long ago that if God is real (and I know he is, can't go into how) then I will have to make my choice to believe the Bible or not. I have of course listened to both sides of the argument, some of my family members are scientifically minded and think I'm mad! So I read this book called, 'in 6 days:why 50 scientists choose to believe in creation', and some of the science baffled me, but the gist was clear. Most christians aren't actually out to make themselves look stupid. Would you open a museum that challenged the way the world thinks if you didn't think you could back up your claims? Or as a scientist would you put your name to a book that made those claims? Remember science once thought the world was flat. Science can be wrong!
In the end though, it doesn't really matter how old the earth is. I used to be concerned about it, as a truth seeker, but all that really matters is that God loves you and sent Jesus to die for you.

Answer 3

Studies of the Earth by palaeontologists, looking at geological evidence & fossil evidence, suggest that the planet is older than 6,000 years. Archaeological evidence indicates the first cities began 6,000 years ago, & the first villages existed 8,000 to 10,000 years ago. Human remains have been found that are 2 million years old. The Earth's geological structure contains features which can only logically, & consistently be interpreted as evidence of billions of years of evolution & continental drift.

The sciences of astronomy & physics reveal that, as light can't travel faster than 300 million meters per second, therefor most of the starlight we see at night must have taken millions of years to reach the Earth.

The Bible doesn't say when God created the Earth & the Cosmos, assuming it was in 6,004 BC, then at some point during that week, he also created the past, going all the way back to the big bang singularity. Maybe there was no big bang, & no primordial soup, no crinoids & trilobites, no permian forests, no dinosaurs, no ape men, no Neanderthals. God is so great & powerful, he can do anything. He extrapolated the past from the future. God created all the minerals necessary for the ecosystem to function, & also fossils, oil, coal, gas, limestone, sandstone, diamonds & more.

I have an open mind to Christianity & any religion. No one can say God didn't create everything in one week, 6,000 years ago, because nothing is impossible for God. Creationists shouldn't be uncomfortable with scientific evidence, because this is the universe God created, & you can't distort the evidence to suit your own ideas. You can believe in creation & evolution.

Answer 4

I think James (the first answer) has the right idea. By the way, please don't call it religious nonsense. One thing most people don't seem to understand is that science and religion DO mix. The scientific view tells us that the earth evolved over millions of years, dinosaurs, monkeys, etc. The Bible tells us that the earth was created in 7 days. We also know that (according to nostradamus) the earth was going to be destroyed in the year 2000. One heavenly day is thousands, if not millions of years. The earth shall be destroyed when the sun explodes. But that will take time. Millions of years, in fact, from the time it starts to expand to the time it explodes. Enough time for Christ to come again and reign on earth for 1000 years (according to religious teaching) which is 1000 heavenly years, i.e. millions of earth years. So the year 2000, in heavenly terms is at the end of time when the sun explodes. Think about it for a while.

Answer 5

The Catholic Church never accepted such an absurd idea. There would be no reason to, since the Catholic Church doesn't accept sola scriptura and personal interpretation of the Bible. This wacko idea is the direct fruit of those ungodly, unbiblical manmade traditions, and no-one but fundamentalist Protestants have ever accepted such a notion. Creationists may "believe" whatever they want to, but educated people of all faiths KNOW that the earth is much, much older than 6,000 years. Much, much older than 6,000,000 years. The evidence is incontrovertible. Which of course is why Creationists refuse to look at the evidence.

Answer 6

Interesting aticle but again a lot of information was left out!
If the world is 6,000 years old then how were stone tools that carbon dated to be about 13,000 years old found in minnesota?

Some of you want us to read the bible and live by it and learn from its words but then you say a day is like 1,000 years.Who told you this? Your preachers? The bible doesn't say god built the universe in 6 days but those days were 1,000 years! You just feel a need to tell everyone they are wrong and you are right and we should live by your beliefs.

Answer 7

No, of course it isn't. It's about 4.5 billion years old. The book of Genesis is not meant to be read like a scientific paper in a journal - it is a book of myths, designed to communicate truth in a poetic way. In any case, it was written three or four thousand years ago, and their understanding of cosmology was rather different to ours! Creationists read Genesis as if it was written yesterday, instead of reading it in the context within which it was written.

Answer 8

After studying the scriptures, bishop Wilberforce once calculated that the Earth was created on the 5th of October, 4030 BC, at 9 AM. Behold the stupidity of man.

Answer 9

A simple, straightforward reading of the Bible indicates that the cosmos was created in six solar days less than 10,000 years ago (the Bible provides impressive chronological data that actually points to about 6,000 years ago). And Exodus 20:11 blocks all attempts to fit millions of years into Genesis 1.

So what about the dating methods that give millions and billions of years? These are far from infallible—they are indirect methods based on quite a few assumptions, and evolutionary geologists themselves will often not accept a radiometric date unless they think it’s correct (i.e. it matches what they already believe).

There are plenty of scientists who question their accuracy. For instance, the “RATE” project has discovered several striking examples of contradictions in these dating methods. If you want, you can get their book or movie called Thousands...Not Billions and learn about some of their remarkable results.

If you do a bit of research, you will find that there is a lot of evidence of radiometric dating not being accurate (like dates of millions of years for lava flows that occurred in the past few hundred years or even decades). There are many examples where the dating methods give ‘dates’ that are incorrect for rocks of known historical age.

Another problem is the conflicting dates between different methods. For example, in Australia, some wood was found that was buried by a lava flow. The wood was ‘dated’ by radiocarbon dating at about 45,000 years old, but the rock it was in was ‘dated’ by the potassium-argon dating at 45 million years old (45 thousand and 45 million)—just a little discrepancy there.

The thing is, all dating methods are fallible, based on assumptions about the past. No one can prove the earth is young and no one can prove the earth is old. We live in the present and when we extrapolate back, we have to make a lot of assumption. None of man’s methods are infallible.

Dr. Jonathan Sarfati put it well: “Creationists admit that they can’t prove the age of the earth using a particular scientific method. They realize that all science is tentative because we do not have all the data, especially when dealing with the past. This is true of both creationist and evolutionist scientific arguments—evolutionists have had to abandon many ‘proofs’ for evolution as well. For example, the atheistic evolutionist W.B. Provine admits: ‘Most of what I learned of the field in graduate school is either wrong or significantly changed.’ Creationists understand the limitations of these dating methods better than evolutionists who claim that they can use certain present processes to ‘prove’ that the earth is billions of years old. In reality, all age-dating methods, including those which point to a young earth, rely on unprovable assumptions.”

Now, what about starlight? First of all, there are a number of great theories proposed to handle this using a creationist cosmology (just look on http://www.answersingenesis.org and http://www.apologeticspress.org and http://www.icr.org).

But God can do what He wants; what would be the use of creating the stars for us if we couldn’t see them? Without that light, the night sky would lack the patterns necessary for the signs, seasons, days, and years specified so clearly in Genesis 1:14.

Second, they fail to mention their own light travel time problem. As Dr. Jason Lisle (an astrophysicist) has said, “The light-travel-time argument cannot be used to reject the Bible in favor of the big bang, with its billions of years. This is because the big bang model also has a light-travel–time problem.”

It’s called the “horizon problem.” Let me see if I can explain this—the big bang requires that the different regions of the universe started with very different temperatures. But today, they all have almost exactly the same temperature in all directions (I’ve read) to a precision of 1 part in 100,000. We know this because of the Cosmic Microwave Background (we can see temperature). There has not been enough time (even with their 20 billion years) for these regions to exchange light in order to come to the same temperature. This is an enormous problem.

As Dr. Jason Lisle further said, “The horizon problem remains a serious difficulty for big bang supporters, as evidenced by their many competing conjectures that attempt to solve it. Therefore, it is inconsistent for supporters of the big bang model to use light-travel time as an argument against biblical creation, since their own notion has an equivalent problem.”

You can’t reject creationism because of a problem when your alternative, the big bang, has essentially the same problem. When they say, “I’m not going to believe in creation because I don’t understand how you can get light from here to here in 6,000 years”—I just answer, “Well, I’m not going to believe in the big bang because I don’t understand how you can get light from here to here in 20 billion years.”

Answer 10

Obviously the people who believe this are ignorant.

However, the ones who say that the days are equivalent to this or that in God's time are also ignorant. When you start saying things shouldn't be taken literally, you have to consider this possibility for EVERYTHING ELSE IN THE BIBLE. Shouldn't a holy text from God be literal and true instead of metaphorical and subject to interpretation?

Many people bend their beliefs to fit what science has discovered, but keep other baseless ideas. It's sad.

Answer 11

The world is millions of years old, as for the universe its trillions - theres stars up there whose light we see tonight started their journey thousands of years ago.